Architecture of Collective Creation

The architecture of collective creation is this book's name for the institutional infrastructure the second cognitive surplus requires but does not yet possess. Wikipedia's editing architecture — an open edit interface, immediate publishing, reversible revisions, separate talk pages for discussion, community-elected administrators — was not elegant, but it worked. The combination of design choices shaped the behavior of millions of people by making certain actions easy, certain actions visible, and certain actions reversible. The architecture did not dictate what people would do; it created conditions under which productive contribution was more likely than destructive contribution, and under which individual contributions aggregated into collective value. The second surplus needs an equivalent architecture, with design requirements substantially more complex because the artifacts produced are substantially more complex: complete software applications rather than paragraph edits, requiring testing, security analysis, usability assessment, and domain-specific evaluation.